Thursday, March 15, 2007

Utrecht, to the south of Amsterdam, is the fourth largest city (pop. 620,000 for greater Utrecht) of The Netherlands. It is famous for its waterways, gothic Dom Tower and especially its university, Holland's largest.

Ondiep is the name of an Utrecht working class neighborhood. It has a population of around 13,000, of which roughly three quarters are indigenous Dutchmen. Twelve per cent are people of Moroccan or Turkish extraction. Last weekend, Ondiep was the scene of violent riots... only, contrary to European standards, the violence was "white". A couple of hundreds non-immigrant Dutchmen ran amok, stoning cops, setting fire to a defunct police precinct here, burning a car or a garbage can there, and generally making a lot of noise. The reason? The death of Ondiep resident Rinie Mulder, a 54-year old indigenous Dutchman, who was shot dead by a police officer. The exact circumstances of the incident are unclear, and a couple of popular myths have emerged, a.o. the fact that the police officer who fired the deadly shot would have been a woman of Moroccan origin, or that Mulder somehow intervened to protect an indigenous pregnant Dutch woman from harassment by Moroccan youths, and managed to grab a knife away from them. These stories have by and large been proven untrue.

But all versions agree on the basic premisse: the continued nuisance, since months, caused by so-called "hangjongeren". Hangjongeren is the Dutch euphemism for groups of Moroccan or Turkish youths hanging around, harassing and intimidating the locals, causing widespread discomfort with blaring CD players, damaging public and private infrastructure and so on. To get an idea of the scope of the discomfort caused, over the past one and a half year police registered a staggering 560 incidents by the immigrant youths... for what is in fact a small neighborhood. And here it is: while the indigenous Ondiep residents had been complaining for months about harassment and intimidation by young Moroccans, it seems that neither police nor town council, apart from registering the violence, ever did anything to solve the problem. Locals claim that the police have actually failed to protect them for years, and that the authorities are simply afraid of confronting the immigrants. In tolerating the criminal behaviour, they apparently hope that the violence will somehow magically fade away (notice that, in such a context, it is hardly surprising to find out that the mayor of Utrecht, Mrs. Annie Brouwer-Korf, is a socialist...).

And so the most agreed upon version is now that after an umpteenth act of vandalism on Sunday evening, March 11, Mr. Mulder had enough of this situation and decided to take matters in his own hand. He left his home in a fit of rage and armed with his own knife, and got subsequently shot when an officer of a passing police patrol thought he was being threatened by Mulder. Or, finally the police acted swiftly and with deadly force. The next evening, Mr. Mulder's death set off the series of riots as some 400 indigenous people gathered on the spot where he was killed and the anger boiled over. Ironically, again the police acted swiftly: 130 arrests were made, of which 60 were Ondiep residents. The remainder seem to have been "football hooligans", a.o. from FC Utrecht, the city's premier soccer team, FC Ajax and FC Feyenoord. The riots continued on Tuesday, after which the mayor let police cordon off the entire neighborhood to keep non-residents out. The mayor's reaction: “I understand that residents are sometimes upset about the nuisance around their own house and neighbourhood. That does you no good whatsoever.”

Well, my hometown has some 10,000 residents and is thus comparable to the Ondiep neighborhood. If I were mayor and in the space of a year and a half 560 incidents involving harassment and intimidation and damage by Moroccan youths against my citizens took place, I would know how to kick ass. But Mrs. Brouwer-Korf "understands that residents are sometimes upset". Jesus Christ.

Let us now have a close look at how Belgian Regime Press reported on this story. From De Standaard, the past week:

I challenge anyone of you to find the words "Moroccan" or "immigrants" in this text. In Holland, a dog with a hat on knows that the situation in Ondiep finally boiled over because of the behaviour of their North African (dare I say "muslim"?) co-citizens. But Belgium's self-proclaimed prime newspaper anxiously refuses to mention any reference to ethnicity. Sounds familiar?

I suppose out there there are good, assimilated Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian or Turkish citizens. When I was treated in a hospital three weeks ago for pneumonia, the first Doctor I saw, at first sight a fairly decent and competent fella, was a certain Dr. Ali R., apparently from Moroccan extraction. But unfortunately, people like Ali R. seem to be a tiny minority. I was not a little bit surprised to learn recently that Mrs. Marij Uijt den Bogaard, a woman who worked for years in the immigrant-pampering industry and as deeply involved in the socialists' multicultural pet projects as someone can possibly get, joined the staff of The Brussels Journal. From TBJ:

In Europe, we are facing a bleak future as it is to be feared incidents like in Ondiep are just the beginning. If nothing drastically happens with regards to our disastrous immigration policy, ludicrous laws like granting nationality to people who by no means share our values and foster absolutely no loyalty towards their host country, and the counterproductive "pampering" policy of newcomers, then Enoch Powell's prediction may come true.